General Electric has unveiled an optical disc which can store 500 Giga bytes of data (equivalent to 500 CDs or 100 DVDs) on a single disc.

Quote:

Scientists at GE’s Global Research Center in upstate New York announced a breakthrough in the pursuit of holographic data storage today. They have discovered the capacity to put 500 gigabytes onto a single DVD-sized disc. That’s equivalent to over 500 CDs or 100 DVDs on a single disc.

So I'll stick with my current strategy of backing up to hard drives via Ethernet and/or USB and storing at least one backup in a fire safe. Failure rates should be very low if the drives aren't powered, valuable data can be backed up twice and the cost per megabyte is about as low as it gets.

Writing huge amounts of data to a disc is not a very enjoyable thing for me either. But given that they are cheap (I mean the 4.7GB ones) and we do need space in our hard drives (provided they are filled up frequently - my 750GB drives do) and we value our data, we can't deny that optical discs are invaluable for data backup and storage. And with the advent of new technology, the prices of current discs are likely to get down which is good news for most people.

Hardware compatibility? Well, If you have the hardware to fill-up 500GB to 2 - 3 TB of data in a couple of months or so, you are very unlikely to face that problem. Possibly a new writer will suffice. But just for the record, this particular technology is still not out in the market, and when it does, it won't be for the masses. Now, if you rarely use the disc, it can have a long life too. And besides, you never know which technology performs the best until you try it. Hard drives have been very reliable so far, but who knows when they are over taken by discs? For VERY important data though, multiple backups in different places are recommended. Additionally may be RAID 7?

Edit.
I think I misunderstood you a little. If you are worried about the discs getting outdated, I think HDD may serve you a little longer. But you do agree that for not-too-important-but-cool stuff you wouldn't want to take out that drive from your safe and put the junk there?

It'll be too expensive when it is out. By the time it gets affordable it'll be too small. Just like DVD and blu-ray. I rarely write those now except for the odd linux install. Hard disks seem to be the sweet spot for capacity and density. Give it 10 years or so I suspect SSDs will finally replace them in cost/capacity.

1TB SSD's are reliative affordable, $4,000 or so for ones on the PCI-E or PCI-X bus - over 600MB/s read write speeds, some in excess of 1000MB/s!! For the people who need that kind of speed, $4k isn't much to cough up.

Good thing is more they are used instead of HDD's, then the cheaper they will get since the economies of scale comes into play.